and the guillotine laughs again
by Vagrancy
Summary: Some mornings, Misa, she wakes up with her bed covered in blood, her shape traced out and singed into the mattress. Postseries. Spoilers for entire series. Dark. Gore. Loads of religious references. What if idea.


Misa, she cups her breasts in her hands, spreads apart the bruised skin around her nipples with her perfectly manicured fingernails. The raised spiderwebs of burnt skin covering her torso, covering everywhere, she says, "Misa doesn't know how she got these marks." All over her, there are scars, lacerations and seperated skin in places no one touches. Places she doesn't even touch. Some mornings, Misa, she wakes up with her bed covered in blood, her shape traced out and singed into the mattress.

The skin of her tits dry and sticking, bloody, to her fingers, Misa tells Sachiko, "They kicked Misa off the bus because she was bleeding everywhere. She wore all black so no one would notice, but it started seeping onto the seats." Her voice rising octaves as she starts to cry, she says, oh, Misa is just so scared.

"Miss Misa-Misa, are you sure there's nothing you could've done to get these scars? Things like this don't happen overnight..." Saying, "Are you sure you didn't do this to yourself?"

"But they do! A-and why would Misa hurt herself like that?"

And the bathwater, it's turning sick red. Misa only staggered through the door minutes ago, but, already, there's blood-film on the porcelain. The only part of her that's not burned and bleeding is her face, and Sachiko strokes it, because Misa, this cursed little girl that might've been her bride, her daughter, all she is is a piece of Light. The son that Sachiko will never get back.

Her baby, her honors student son, turned mass-murderer. That little son of hers, the one that broke apart her entire family, the one she taught and loved and punished, he's six feet under ground, with the highest body count owed to one person, ever.

Misa lets her hands drop to run over the cave of her fashion-diet stomach, white flakes of skin coming off as her fingernails scrape. She asks, "Will Light be home soon? Will Light take me to the doctor? Will Light take care of his Misa-Misa?"

It's been months, but no one has the heart to tell her Light's gone.

And Sachiko, touching Misa's mascara-stained face with her fingertips, mopping up the pus around Misa's collarbone, where her choker hangs to cover the bite marks from her new manager-slash-boyfriend, she whispers, "Of course he will, dear."

* * *

Matt's asking, "Where did you get that martyr complex, anyway?" Standing there, his body still riddled with bullet holes, he's asking, "That desire of yours to sacrifice everything for everyone else, that gnawing little need to protect anyone and anything, where the hell did you get that?"

"And where did you get that desire to sit on your ass and not do anything? That gnawing little need to be punched in the face before you'll help me?" Mello, mocking him, he smiles.

He has this habit of fisting the crucifix around his neck so tight, it cuts into his hand; this habit of saying, No one ever said that this how things are after you die.

The flat expanse of nothing, the gray dark skies of wherever the are, purgatory or hell or whatever, it's littered with death note pages. All of them soaked into the ground from being walked on. Here, you can walk for hours, but you never get tired. Here, you can walk for what feels like days, feels like miles, but you always end up back where you started.

And Matt leans down, roots through the soggy pages until he brings something up. The wind whistling through a hole in his chest, this wound from a policeman's .325 grain that pierced his pericardium and caused the exsanguination that would've killed him if the other shots hadn't, he snorts. "Hey, Mello, look at this. Turns out that JFK guy wasn't really assassinated after all..."

When Mello's not careful, sometimes, he catches this charred piece of nothing out of the corner of his eye. Some black, slim walking thing, smelling like old smoke. It cries like a woman, these loud wails that Matt says he can't hear. Mello, when he looks hard enough, he can see flashes of white when it passes by: her bare spine, a news anchor's bright smile.

* * *

Misa, bleeding through Sachiko's towel, she's calling for her mama. Calling for Light, for Matsuda, Mogi, for anyone. Saying, she's hurt, and she doesn't want to be alone.

Her hair matted down with everything from her wounds, her body leaking like a sieve, she's just bawling.

Sachiko, her almost daughter-in-law turned breathing corpse. The model, turned scarred hysteric.

When a god dies, everyone starts picking up the pieces of them. The creations, they're only made up of the worst parts of their creators.

Misa, curled in Sachiko's lap, her shape bloodying itself onto the starched white of Sachiko's apron, what she doesn't know is, that this, it's the mark of Saint Takada.

The stigmata of the church of Kira's very own fucking Mary Magdalene.

All this blood, all the welts, the burn scars covering Misa's tits, her shoulders, her stomach, she's just the virgin-whore, take two.

Misa's head pressed to Sachiko's neck, Sachiko's rocking her, and she's whispering lullabies. Into Misa's ear, she's whispering these sweet little nothings. What she wants to do, is tell Misa, "This is a list of things you don't know..." One, being your fiancee is dead, and the next, it's how Sachiko, she's scared out of her goddamned mind.

* * *

The prison doctors, they have no idea why there are gunshot wounds in Mikami's hands, pieces of he's picked up of god, but he knows. Restrained, he's saying, "I take it you have a basic familiarity with the Christian religion." The doctor's spreading apart the hole with gloved fingers, and Mikami's breathing hard: "Christians, they say, 'But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.' And the same is true for Kira. Same for my lord, for Kira. He will come back."

Back in solitary confinement, his hands bandaged, Mikami starts counting down the hours. To the guard outside his cell, he says, "In the Pacific time zone, my lord will return in 48 hours, 23 minutes, and 54 seconds, if my calculations are correct."

The lawyer's rattling on, and the guard can't help but notice that Mikami's keeping perfect time. There's not a timepiece in sight, but he's listing times in three different time zones, correct right down the second.

* * *

They're walking, following that burnt body that Mello sees, and Matt says, "Dammit." His boots covered in paper-pulp from the death note pages, he says, "I guess you were right. You really can't believe anything you hear, anything that you see."

Beneath them, there's the plans for so many deaths. They're walking on all these truths, all the answers to political assassinations and so many unsolved mysteries, and Mello's following the after-body of the woman who killed him, killed Matt. He doesn't know it, but this charred corpse, it's got more influence on the living world than he ever had.

It's not like it matters anymore, but Mello, he has no idea what he's going to do when he catches up with this thing. What he's not going to say is: "Sorry."

See also: "So you're the bitch that killed me, huh?"  
See also: "We were going to die soon, anyway."  
See also: "Yeah, damn right, I wanted my best friend and I to die as martyrs for our cause."

* * *

Takada, she stops, and the skin just falls off the shelves of her ribcage. Off the jutting curves of her pelvis. All the places Light, her Kira, would touch when he fucked her, they're bare and shining white.

And she can't stop praying.

* * *

Matsuda, he has these dreams he won't tell anyone about, and what they say about murderers always returning to the scene of the crime, well, it's true.

He spends his night in the warehouse, fenced in with police tape, and he says, "Yagami-kun, I'm so sorry." Matsuda, his voice echoing off the metal walls, he says, "Y-you can stop haunting me anytime you'd like."

Gunshots, they just follow him around. He hears them when he's sitting in his apartment, when he's sitting in the warehouse, confessing his sins to the god he murdered. The unwilling Pontius Pilate, he's seeing blood and Light's face, everywhere.

"I never meant to--to hurt you, to cause your death, but what you were doing was wrong."

In his dreams, the scene replays itself, over and over again, and he can see himself, the malicious murderer, firing the bullets. Severing tendons, breaking the tiny bones of Light's fingers when they hit.

Before that, Matsuda, he'd never fired a gun with intent to harm.

When he looks in the mirror now, he can see Light's reflection behind him. The quick silver flash of someone else's face, the hawk-sharp angles, the grin a criminal has after he's been right under your nose for so long, he sees that over his shoulder. The images, Light bloodied and screaming, the way his eyes bulged, wild, like an animal trapped, they haunt him, like the crime scene photos he had to look at back in police school. Little girls with their mouths sliced in ear to ear smiles, organs hanging out of the gaping abdominal cavity of a murderered prostitute. Yeah, those anonymous bodies were bad enough in dettached black and white, but this time, he's the murderer. This time, he's the source of the gore, and Matsuda, he doesn't think he'll ever get over that.

Thou shall not kill those that don't try to kill you, first.

The cold of the warehouse floor seeping up his legs, through his pants, Matsuda keeps apologizing. He's sitting on the spot where the heart attack hit his friend, his coworker, his victim, and he's begging for forgiveness he's never going to get.

When a god dies, everyone starts picking up the pieces of them. The creations, they're only made up of the worst parts of their creators, and no one ever tells you this is what happens when you kill someone.

That night, way after his shift is over, Matsuda goes home. He can eat a convenience store dinner, flip through the personal ads in the newspaper, watch a skin-deep soap opera on TV, but he can't get rid of the noises in his head.

* * *

And the blast, the gunshot and the scream and the howling noise of everything, it just fucking rings. 


End file.
